Tabloid slams novelist Mantel over Kate comments

LONDON — A novelist, a duchess and a tabloid newspaper have made an explosive combination in Britain.

The Daily Mail on Tuesday ran a front-page broadside against two-time Booker Prize-winner Hilary Mantel for her "venomous attack" on the former Kate Middleton.

In a speech earlier this month, Mantel characterized the wife of Prince William as "a jointed doll on which certain rags were hung ... a shop-window mannequin."

Mantel said that as a royal consort, Kate "appeared to have been designed by committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished."

Mantel's speech, reprinted this week in the London Review of Books, was about the British public's complex relationship with royalty over the centuries — a relationship both symbiotic and voyeuristic.

The speech looked at the way the public and the press glorify and destroy royals, from Anne Boleyn to Princess Diana, casting them in roles and stories in which "adulation can swing to persecution, within hours."

But for the Daily Mail, this became "an astonishing and venomous attack on the Duchess of Cambridge."

The newspaper's front page juxtaposed pictures of the author and the duchess alongside the front-page headline "A plastic princess designed to breed."

It quoted Mantel's speech at length, though did not note that Mantel was describing what she saw as a view of Kate constructed by the press and public opinion.

Online reaction was divided, with some slamming Mantel but others defending her words as provocative and thoughtful.

Even Prime Minister David Cameron — on a trip to India — commented about the affair. The Press Association news agency reported that he called Mantel's comments "completely misguided and completely wrong."

Others argued that Mantel's real target was not Kate, but the press. On the Daily Telegraph website, journalist Catherine Scott said Mantel's speech was "an attack on how some parts of the media canonize royal women ... while also rendering them voiceless and purposeless."

The royal couple's office declined to comment.

Meanwhile, a large media presence was on hand to record the duchess as she visited a center for recovering addicts Tuesday in one of her first public appearances since announcing in December that she was pregnant. News reports commented on the 31-year-old duchess's baby bump and Max Mara dress.

Mantel, 60, won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012 for "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies," novels set at the court of King Henry VIII and centered on the king's search for a queen who will give him a male heir.

Her speech touched on royal figures from Henry's wife Anne Boleyn to Kate.

Mantel said Diana "passed through trials, through ordeals at the world's hands." Prince Harry "doesn't know which he is, a person or a prince" — a confusion Harry himself recently remarked on.

And Kate, whose first child is due in July, finds herself cast by the press as someone whose "only point and purpose (is) to give birth."

Of the royal family, she said that "however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it's still a cage."

Mantel ended her speech — ironically, given the media furor — with a plea for us all "to back off and not be brutes."